


The First Ten Years

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Other, Promptfic, The Vault (Doctor Who), flashfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-26
Updated: 2018-06-26
Packaged: 2019-05-29 00:57:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15061562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: In approximate response to the questions: "Who said “I love you” first? and who ends their arguments in a fight with “Because I love you”? Who wakes the other up in the middle of the night to tell them a cool dream they had? Who has the most nightmares, and who sings them back to sleep after? Who is super bad at sexting? and who sends them encouraging messages throughout the day? Who falls asleep in the others lap and who carries them to bed?"





	The First Ten Years

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stackcats](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stackcats/gifts).



It doesn’t matter how she pounds on the door. He’s not letting her out, so just shut _up_ , Missy, _please_! The Doctor doesn’t want to seem desperate because that’s exactly what he is, and he’s already had a fight with Nardole--Nardole, who followed him to Extremis to talk him into doing exactly what he is now objecting to so irritatingly--and he’s not up for a fight with Missy, too. He’s never won in a fight with the Master; he’s only ever got a headache, or if he’s lucky, or if they’re both very angry, a good tupping out of it. 

“Just let us out, then.” When it becomes clear the Doctor isn’t going to take the bait, Missy’s voice turns reasonable, if wheedling. 

“No.”

The Doctor can almost hear her slump against the door, faux-floppy. “Why not? Is it because you’re afraid of me?”

“No.”

“Is it because you promised?”

“No.”

“Is it because I promised?”

“No.”

Missy doesn’t say anything for a while, and the Doctor wonders if she’s gearing up for a sulk, if she’s going to scream or curse or throw herself against the door again, denigrate him or torment him or sit, silently ignoring him, until he gives in. She did promise. He did promise. He is afraid. 

Once, just once, he’s said it before. Then, he was the Master’s prisoner. Then, he’d felt helpless, even fighting. The Master had gloated, keeping him weak, keeping him abject, trying to goad a reaction out of him, condemnation, rejection, confirmation of the Master’s power and bad behaviour, his ability to cause pain. The Doctor had gritted his teeth through all of it, and, huddled, on his knees at the Master’s feet, he’d looked up at that shining whirlwind of his angry mad best friend, and he’d meant it then, too, when the Master asked him why he would bear witness and still hope, still forbear--as he means it now. He sighs, speaks as though to himself, knowing she’ll hear him anyway.

“It’s because I love you.”

~

When you don’t sleep, a human habitation--even a university campus--gets very quiet at night. The Doctor’s been making a device, a device that goes Ding! (and also zooong, and WOwwowwow...and _oom_ pah!) to fill the night hours, but Nardole Does Not Approve, and if the Doctor’s going to do something of which Nardole Does Not Approve, he might as well go and do it down by the vault, wherein he has placed a person who will actually understand his ideas and the principle behind the device that he is building, if not the motivation. 

But halfway through his expository monologue, the Doctor becomes convinced that the Master is not listening, which is very unusual, because while there are many things the Doctor has to say to which the Master refuses to attend, inspiration for diverting schemes have always, always been on their list of interests in common. His babble slows to a trickle before it’s soaked up entirely by the porous limestone. 

“...Missy?” His voice sounds querulous, but he refuses to ask if she’s there, or whether she’s all right, because both questions are fatuous to the point of contempt. 

If he listens very hard, he can hear the rustle of her skirts, sometimes, or her footstep around the interior of the vault. 

“A thousand years,” Missy says. 

“It’s not so long.” But of course it is, and the terror courses between them, muttering claustrophobia. It’s only when the device drops to the floor, startling them (it moos when turned over) that the Doctor takes a sharp breath. “--Only it keeps going off when the students come for their tutorials. I was hoping you might be able to help me figure out why.”

He doesn’t tell her his plan, the other one, the one that hangs on her helping him, now, tomorrow, and every night for the next nine hundred and ninety five years. It’s better she doesn’t know. If she knows, it won’t work. If she knows, she won’t let him sit with her, through the night, talking past the nightmare.

~

The first message arrives in the middle of a lecture, marking, also, the first time the Doctor abandons a lecture halfway through, though it is by no means the last.

The first message takes the Doctor by surprise, and is rather awkward because it arrives circa 1958, a time in which humans had not yet invented mobile telephones, and students did not spend their lectures engrossed in them. The telephone’s bell echoes across the lecture hall, and the silence when the Doctor stares, shocked, at the mouthpiece, is resounding. 

The first message is only a still image, artfully presented with the resolution and saturation of a contemporary photograph, but soon they become moving images, short videos, still strategically grainy. The Doctor has no clue how Missy has managed to send a signal at all, much less capture and process the footage. He doesn’t know how to stop them. He’s pulled the phone out of the wall, he’s snipped the wire, he’s removed the device. The only thing he hasn’t done is request that the wiring be taken out entirely. He doesn’t have that kind of influence, not yet.

He learns to cope. He learns to pick up the phone as soon as it begins to ring, to glance at the provocative image only as long as it plays, and then to set the receiver back on the hook. He schools his face not to react. His students, too, learn that this is just another one of those things the 'Doctor' does. If anything, the eccentric behaviour adds to his legend. 

She sends them when he’s alone in his office, too, though, and there he gives her more of his attention. He even responds in kind, sometimes, feeling gauche but doing his best, throwing off his jacket, rolling up his sleeves. She eggs him on with escalatingly appreciative text. They set up a retro video conference. She threatens him, he mollifies her, she flirts with him. He enjoys it.

But then she forgets to shut off her camera. He’s sat at his desk, congratulating himself for an interaction well negotiated, when he sees her still in shot, all her bravado suddenly gone. She looks around herself, turning a tiny circle, listless. His furnishings are lush; hers--Nardole must have brought her that chair and that table. The Doctor’s forbidden her anything, precisely because she can do things like rig a communications system out of a dinner tray and a glass of water. 

Before she sees that he’s still watching, he reaches for the control to cut the feed, so she doesn’t have to.

~

He tests the beds before he orders one. He tells them he’ll pick it up because he can’t very well ask them to deliver it. He sends her a catalogue, too, and suggests that she chooses something. At the showroom, he's distracted by all the bouncing, and he’s not really sure whether it's her fault or his when they end up with so many chairs. 

The only thing to do, with all the furniture piled up, waiting to go into the vault, is to increase its internal volume. 

“Why did you get this bed?” Missy asks as she stands on her tiptoes to stretch the dimensional membrane. 

“It was very comfortable.”

“I don't need a bed. I would like a workbench. There was nothing like that in the catalogue. Only chintz and floral prints and mint-green things.”

“You don't get a workbench. You need comfortable things to sit on. You looked uncomfortable.”

Missy freezes. “When did I look uncomfortable?”

“On the screen. I think Nardole stole that chair from someone’s back garden.”

Missy slaps him, and then she's tearing at her improvised camera, smashing it against the bare and unforgiving floor, and before he's over the shock, she throws Nardole’s chair at him, too. It glances off his shoulder, bruising but not cutting, but he drops his work, stalking to her, his anger half physical reaction, half self-protective guilt. He stops her before she can grab anything else to use against him, his hands clenching around her upper arms. 

Behind him, the edge of the room sizzles, shrinking fast around them. 

Missy wrenches herself out of his grip to make a dash for the manifold, pulling it taut again before it can constrict and crush them. The Doctor pries an anchor out of the wall for her to hook it on to. 

She glares at him as she flounces onto the bed. 

“Never watch me without my permission again,” she says. 

“I can't promise that. I have to monitor you.” He's sorry, but...mostly he's sorry that she's found out. 

She smooths the bed sheet under her hand. She traces the quilting of the mattress. “You carried me here yourself when I was incapacitated. You brought me here when you should have killed me.”

“You begged me not to.”

“I've begged you before.”

“I've always appreciated it when you've turned out to be alive.”

Missy doesn't object when he joins her on the bed, but she looks away. “Nine hundred, ninety years,” she says. 

“It'll be over in a beat of a Time Lord’s hearts.”

Missy flops back, and the Doctor (who might, one day, but not today, not yet, like to put his head in Missy's lap) follows. They lie on their backs, their arms tucked in, not touching. 

“My dear, I have to wonder if we’ll last that long.” 

The ceiling of the vault is quite nice. It presses down on them from above, defining one of the boundaries that keeps them safe. 

She turns to him, and he turns to face her, propping his head with his arm bent at the elbow. 

“Get out,” she demands, point blank. She slams the door of the vault behind him.


End file.
